Socialtext Introducing Wiki Software That Lets You Work Offline

Socialtext Unplugged aims to serve the occasionally disconnected. Users can visit a Socialtext Unplugged page, edit it, and save it only using a Web browser. Changes can be synced to the server-based wiki later.

Wikis -- group editable Web sites -- are becoming more popular as a means for online group collaboration, but those who benefit from such systems, business travelers in particular, are often offline while on the road.

Socialtext Unplugged, developed in conjunction with U.K. software developer Osmosoft Ltd., aims to serve the occasionally disconnected. "It breaks a lot of people's assumptions about what a Web application can be," says Jeremy Ruston, the creator of TiddlyWiki and founder of Osmosoft. "It's a Web application that doesn't use a service."

Like the TiddlyWiki software on which it's based, Socialtext Unplugged relies on JavaScript to make the Web pages into self-contained applications. "It merges the document paradigm with the Web paradigm of computing," Ruston says.

Thus users can visit a Socialtext Unplugged page, edit it, and save it using only a Web browser. And upon re-establishing an Internet connection, changes can be synced to a server-based wiki.

Synchronization isn't a completely automated process, but that's by design. In situations where two offline workers enter conflicting changes, human intervention is necessary to figure out which should take precedence.

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, believes a lot of enterprise Web services will gain offline functionality soon. "It's part of a broader trend," he says. "You'll see a lot of Enterprise 2.0 apps trying to develop offline capabilities. There's a challenge in doing so. Suddenly you have to support all sorts of platforms."

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.